A little autumn atmosphere (photos)

I like to move holiday decorations around in the house, sometimes even during the same holiday. We use a lot of the same things every year, but they end up in different places. At Thanksgiving I had a few dollar-store pinecone-leaf-ribbon things in a bowl and on the table. I don't usually go out of my way to buy things like that, but I was planning on using them later for something quite different. Which turned out to be impractical, but I still did find another use for them (see below).

The Thanksgiving decoration in the entryway was our two scarecrows, fake leaves someone gave us, and wooden canisters from a yard sale. (Real leaves are nice too, but they get crumbly.)

Today I changed it around for an end-of-October mood. We still have the scarecrows, but I added an oil lamp and the pinecone decorations in a flat basket, along with a (real) green and orange gourd.  What do you think?

(The rust-coloured doily was made by an awesome thread-crocheter that some of you know. You should consider this a hint.)

Thanksgiving weekend (photos)

Saturday yard saling: All year round

For $5, I picked up a whole bag of craft supplies and holiday stickers: glitter, edging scissors,brushes, pipecleaners, all that. They also threw in the package of bamboo skewers that I was going to buy anyway.

 

I was able to salvage about half the pipe cleaners. I tossed the messed-up ones, along with the pink boondoggle and some of the glitter glue. Mr. Fixit took the foam paintbrush and the other brushes.

Now we are equipped for everything from Valentine's Day to Christmas to Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Mr. Fixit's Retro Birthday Party

 Front hall--throwback toys.

 Special person, special plate.

Everybody needs a souvenir.

Horse parties--enough of this galloping around

"I want a horse party"--sounds simple, right?

A lot of the horse-and-pony-party websites assume that you must have unlimited funds and/or local stores brimming with cowboy toys. Some peoples' descriptions of their children's parties sound more like the Calgary Stampede. We wanted to have fun, but maybe not on that scale. Still, how hard could it be to come up with a few horse-themed decorations or toys?

Mama Squirrel can now understand why people end up buying the whole thing online.

We went to a party-ware store that had one mylar horse balloon--and that was it, the rest of the store seemed to be all 40th-birthday parties and adult Halloween costumes.

We went to the bulk store and couldn't find anything neat or original (which turned out to be a good thing since one of the guests has peanut allergies and can't have anything from the bulk store). Jellybeans and pretzels would have been fine, but we were hoping for something sort of cool, like gummy horseshoes.

We went to the "bargain store"--like the dollar store but they charge more. They had no party stuff at all. And very few horses.

We went to the Big Z department store, looked in the toy aisle and found nothing except big toy sets. We did pick up some striped paper plates and napkins, and two packages of dried-fruit snacks.

We went to the Craft Store. All the horse stickers were in the scrapbooking section and priced accordingly. We settled for plastic harmonicas, two packs of balloons, and a Toob of tiny horses (which ended up as game prizes). Mama Squirrel also bought a big ball of brown yarn--which became horses. (Note on the harmonicas: we would probably have been better off with the kazoos they sold, since those are supposed to sound kind of bad anyway.)

(We already had stuffing and scraps of other yarn for manes and saddles. Mama Squirrel would point out that the pattern, while quite good, has a couple of quirks. There's no mention of tails, and there's also no mention of stuffing the legs--but since we didn't want collapsed horses, we thought it must have been just an omission. Also, if you'll notice, all those seven horses were made by the same person using the same pattern--and some of them are quite different, depending on how firm they are stuffed and on the angle that the head is sewn on. No right or wrong, just pointing out how much Results Can Vary.)

We thought we had some clear gift bags, but remembered that we used them up at Christmas. Tin pails would have been fun, but not at Craft Store prices. So Crayons potato-printed paper lunch bags (we made a horseshoe and a star print), and we filled them with the fruit snacks, harmonicas, and crocheted horses. It might have been nice to have a few other candies or smaller things, but as Mama Squirrel has already pointed out, such things were not exactly plentiful (and we didn't think we could handle any more stores).

For decorations, we blew up the balloons, put out as many horse toys and books as we could find, and sidewalk-painted horseshoes coming up to the front door. (Ponytails added a welcome message with chalk.)

And Crayons took charge of the front-door table.